she is in a canoe in a trough and she has a virtual reality helmet on her head. She rows steadily but the constant-flow current pushing against her and her craft keep her stationary

while the vr changes what she sees, which are ghosts against a backdrop of dizzying riverbank

mountainscapes. the ghosts are the real-life characters in playlets plucked from her memories, moments good and bad from her relationships, that through biofeedback were chosen

as appropriate “life lessons.” they serve to distract her from the ache of her exertions

and, it is hoped, help her to process what happened between her and her lovers

so that she might move on. the lining under her eyes inside the helmet is of a material

that wicks away her tears and sweat.

two good cries and 90 minutes of strong pulling, and the bell chimes and the images fade

and the current ebbs to stillness. she wonders

when the apparatus will deem it non-traumatic and therapeutic

to show scenes of her with carlita

and jules and marcus.

if you want quiet

it might help to listen to the right things

like a ladybug on a leaf

or Antares.

sometimes you have internal noise

but if you realize you have heard those strident, scolding messages before

they may become mere grumbles and murmurs.

here a swish to hear, there a siren to ignore.

closing your eye completes the equation.

my 70th birthday approaches my friends/and though i rejoice my alivedness/the upped crepitation encroaches my friends/and meds make existence contrivedness

young folk call me boomer in scorn-condescension/implying i’m taking up spacing/how useless my latin nouns with each declension/how t u r t l e s l o w dull is my pacing

i need no revenge though there’s some to be had/with hourglass watches and mire/ their years will flash by like a stripper unclad/and eternity dims all desire

fix is fuzzy fix is funny fix mix definition/a junkie’s dose a quick repair your target in position/and prefix suffix affix transfix mix the fixes more/o postfix infix crucifix a fixture with a corps

it lends itself to oxymoron try this on and check it

the finest way to fix a bad guy’s wagon is to wreck it

something is forming in the cloudscape/that defies the nature of cloud/for it seems more substantial than fluff/more angular and designed

as it coalesces/it takes the form of an alphabet block/with a capital B on all the sides/slowly drifting and tumbling/across the sky

it is insubstantial yet holds its shape/except that the letterforms shift/and the Bs become 9s

then the faces become blank

then the Bs come back/hold for three or so minutes/change to 9s/hold (all the while slowly/drifting and tumbling)/for three or so minutes/go blank and stay blank for seven or so minutes/then the sequence repeats

dusk comes and the hard-edged shadow/of the block/melts into the shadow/of the earth

B°9 B°9 B°9 keeps repeating/with the two alphanumerics/becoming subtly contrast-lit/in the growing gloom

then the block stops tumbling and drifting/and takes on an egg shape/oyster-pale and pulsing

and within the egg a sort of 3D cartoon/of a stereotype flying saucer/with a stereotypical humanoid alien/half out of the hatch on top/waving/in looped animation

after a minute of this/the block reforms

but this time the changing alphanumerics/go from B to Y to E to hyphen/twice

then the block vanishes

without a trace

tiny droplets hang in air/it’s an antiperspirant/flammable yet debonair/for the pit-stink curst (we’re blunt)

garden hose-stream plugg’d with thumb/rainbow’d in the midst of mist/odd as mined molybdenum/thumber feels like he’s been kissed

Afterword: When visiting one of my California cousins and watering her back yard, I relearned the fun fact that rainbows are available rain or shine with water from a garden hose, your thumb, and the just-right angle relative to the light source. That’s where the second stanza came from. As for the first stanza, I challenged myself to make a fairly decent rhyme for antiperspirant and now wonder if I’ve made poetic history. 🙂

“You see, they get holes in them.” Albert Einstein, explaining why he never wore socks

If everyone stopped wearing socks and yet sockmakers maintained manufacture

One way to put them to use would be to sew bunches of them into throw-pillow-like gizmos that would follow fall-prone people around using Roomba technology, so that when the person fell it would zip under them, thereby preventing bruise and fracture.

We could also make everything from handguns to cannons that were designed based on T-Shirt-Cannon technology to harmlessly and via compressed air fire projectiles made out of socks that are soft and fluffy,

And then melt down or otherwise repurpose all ordnance capable of killing people, and when the gun nuts go ballistic so to speak say Hey, reread the Second Amendment, which gives you the right to bear arms but never breathes a word about what KIND of arms, have a free Sock-Shooter and stop being huffy.

With enough socks you can make a megacushion that would unsplat your landing even if you fell off a steeple,

You could make car-muffler cozies that shut off the car engine if the muffler noise exceeded 60 decibels, protecting pedestrian hearing and ticking off the loud-car people;

And I am no inventor but give funding to anyone willing to follow the mandate of using socks to make the world more benign

And soon all would turn warm and fuzzy and truly fine.

Afterword: Fans of the late, great Ogden Nash will recognize my attempt to adopt his style. His whimsical poetry truly made the world a more warm and fuzzy place. How I miss him!

for certain improprieties

loose change will make a sin a breeze

in other climes and rhymes betimes

tenacity will ring your chimes. well

travelogued, your journeys; you

instinctively appoint a view/help

nested townsfolk rarefy/from

getting down to getting hi

Afterword: This whimsical down-one-side-and-up-the-other Double Acrostic is not quite nonsense; it makes a flitting sort of sense if you consider that the poem tells you with its title that it is about impulsivity. The poem came to be after it occurred to me that though the phrase “fleeting impulse” is as old hat as the phrase “old hat,” the phrase “flitting impulse” may be more apt, implying as it does quick and jerky motion rather than sudden evaporation, and yet an Internet search yields far fewer instances (but it delights me to see that there ARE such instances!) of the latter than the former.

Constructing the poem with a consistent rhyme and meter was a fun challenge. Thank Goodness for the forward-slash line break symbol that lets me break to the next line while staying on the line! 🙂